“What are you crying for, Charlie?” she said.
“The children.”
“Which children?”
“All of them.”
Thirty-One
“Charlie.”
“Um?”
“Charlie.”
He turned against her, no more than half awake and startled by her voice, her closeness, the warmth and smoothness of her skin.
“There’s something on my head.”
“Oh.” Reaching up, one of Resnick’s hands inadvertently brushed against her breast. “Dizzy, come down. Come on.”
He prized the cat carefully away, wary that Dizzy’s claws would become entangled with the curls of Rachel’s hair. Setting the cat down on the floor, Resnick waited for him to jump back and when he did, pushed him more energetically away. The fur of his tail fluffed out, Dizzy sulked out of the room.
“Jealous,” Resnick said.
“He’s no need to be.”
“He’ll get used to it.”
Rachel ran a finger down the inside of Resnick’s arm. “He won’t have to.” Looking at her, close enough to see himself reflected in her eyes, Resnick’s fingers closed around hers.
“What time is it, Charlie?”
He brought her arm up in the bed until he could read the hands of her watch. “Ten-past six.”
“I have to leave by seven.”
It was already five-to and Rachel was drinking coffee and putting on her eye shadow; in the bedroom, Resnick was sorting through his shirts.
“You were married, Charlie. Why didn’t you have any kids?”
“The only time we might have was right afterwards, the first year or so. But then it was me, I was the one who wasn’t sure, wanted to wait. I was just getting into the job, I suppose, maybe I was frightened of the disruption, the responsibility, I don’t know. Later, well, later it was different. There were other things on her agenda.”
She could see him through the mirror, loosening the top of his trousers to tuck in his shirt, watching her.
“How about you?” Resnick said.
Rachel was checking her diary, one arm in her coat: they were standing in the hall.
“Young professionals; it wasn’t an issue.”
“And now?”
“Now, I don’t think about it, not often, and, when I do, I still don’t know if I want any. Sometimes…” She pushed the diary down into her bag and finished fastening her coat…“But then I’ve never been sure enough or I suppose by now I would have done something about it.”
She felt him looking at her and knew what he was thinking. It didn’t make her feel comfortable.
“Bye, Charlie.” She opened the door. Outside it was still quite dark.
“I’ll call you.”
“No.”
Rachel watched as anxiety narrowed his eyes. “It’s my turn to call you.”
Jack Skelton had either found the time to buy a new suit or discovered one in the back of his wardrobe that Resnick didn’t remember. He went through the briefing session even more briskly than usual. The blowups of the bodies were still tacked to the wall; the map enlargements with their annotations in red and blue marker; now two ten by twelve photographs of Leonard Simms, one a right profile, the other frontal. In both he looked startled, his eyes protruding slightly from their sockets, cheeks drawn in as if catching breath.
“What I shall say to the press is this: a man has been helping us with our inquiries into the deaths of Shirley Peters and Mary Sheppard, neither he nor anybody else has been charged, but we do confidently expect an arrest will be made shortly.”
“Shortly,” said Colin Rich. “Why not now?” As usual it was difficult to tell whether he was asking a specific question or thinking aloud.
The superintendent chose to answer. “To present, Simms has been here voluntarily. He asked to see his doctor and that was arranged, but always said he didn’t want a solicitor. Now he seems to be changing his mind on that score and I’m not convinced we have enough evidence on which to charge him. He’s still denying any actual contact with the Peters woman and in no way have we been able to link him with the second murder.”
“That aside,” put in the DCI, “laddie’s very much our best bet.”
“But in the meanwhile,” said Skelton, “we continue to explore other avenues.”
“Or blind alleys, eh, Charlie?” Colin Rich winked.
Resnick knew that, when he talked to Skelton, the superintendent would tell him to put at least two more of his team back on to the main inquiry. Contact magazines, dating agencies, singles clubs: action was continuing to be initiated, paper work still piling up.
Patel had typed his report with the usual painstaking application of Tipp-Ex and an uncertainty, shared by the majority of the population, about the use of the apostrophe. Resnick held the sheets folded back against the counter and spooned the sprinkling of chocolate from the surface of his cappuccino. Names of publications, academic posts held, bits and pieces of biography culled from slender sources, what did it all add up to? Repression, defacement. He wondered if Patel’s page of notes outlining Doria’s lecture on Derrida and Deconstruction meant any more to him than a collection of words, shuffled together. Repression and defacement: provocation and closure.
“Moonlighting, Inspector?”
Suzanne Olds was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder. Resnick refolded the papers and slid them back into their envelope.
“A little heavy for before lunch, isn’t it?” she said, taking the stool next to him.
“Research,” Resnick explained.
“A closet intellectual.” She took a pack of cigarettes from her shoulder bag and then a lighter. “You’re a surprising man.” She lit a cigarette. “Open University, is it? Career move or just a hobby?”
“I didn’t know you came here?” Resnick said.
“I must be honest, I prefer the espresso bar downstairs at Next but there wasn’t a spare seat.”
“Coffee’s better up here.”
“It’s stronger.”
“Exactly.”
Suzanne Olds put a 50p coin on the counter and told the girl to keep the change. “How’s the inquiry coming along?”
“We confidently expect an arrest to be made shortly.”
“Thanks,” she said, averting her head to release a film of gray smoke, “I read the first edition.”
“Then you know.”
“From what I hear you’ve got some half-witted flasher doing his best to talk himself into the High Court.”
“You’re not representing him?”
“I didn’t think anybody was.”
“Besides,” said Resnick, “if you read the rest of the piece, you’ll know we let him walk away.”
“How far and for how long?”
Resnick gave his coffee a stir and drank it down in three swallows.
“You don’t think he did it, do you?” She was leaning her head towards him and he still didn’t like her perfume. There was, though, something about the way her skin stretched tight over high cheekbones…
“Don’t I?”
“Inspector, I’ve seen you when you’re convinced a man’s guilty. That interrogation of Macliesh…”
“I regret that.”
“Why?” Her hand was resting on his sleeve. “I thought you were very impressive.”
“I’ve got to go,” Resnick said, putting the envelope into his inside pocket, getting down from the stool.
“You know,” Suzanne Olds said, “you could be an attractive man if ever you decided to take the trouble.”
Resnick had no trouble in not looking back.
For Christmas they had pork: slices of it a quarter-inch thick that her father would slice away from the bone, golden-yellow crackling, roast parsnips and potatoes, applesauce to which her mother had added a thimbleful of brandy at the last moment. Her mother had been on to her about it since her last letter, this Sunday’s eleven-thirty phone call.
“You will be home? You will be here? Christmas Eve, your dad says. He could do with some help on the last delivery. Can’t trust that lad to come in. Oh, and the bird for that inspector of yours…”
Lynn wondered how difficult it would be to arrange for a spell of duty that would carry her across into the New Year.